The Woman From Tantoura

  My uncle lived in anticipation, like my mother, but her anticipation was different. The concern about returning home hid behind her anticipation of the return of her sons and her husband. She kept saying, “The boys haven’t sent any news from Egypt, nor has Abu Sadiq sent a letter from prison.” Whenever she heard that a man from our village or from another had arrived in Sidon and had been among the prisoners, she would seek him out and go to visit him. She would congratulate him first, and then ask, “Did you meet Abu Sadiq?” She would return to the house to tell us what the freed prisoner had said, and every time she would repeat the same words: “It’s been a long time for Abu Sadiq. One of the spies must have told them that he was in the revolt in ’36 so that instead of one charge it was two, and they decided to imprison him longer than the others. How long it’s been!” One day my aunt tried gently to prepare the way for her sister to accept what happened. She said, “Zeinab, Sister, they say that some of the men died in prison, maybe Abu Sadiq was one of them.” My mother started as if she had been stung by a scorpion and exclaimed, “God forbid! I take refuge with God from you and your thoughts!” For the next three weeks in a row my mother’s face was pale, and it became paler if she was forced to speak with her sister or be present with her in the same room.

  The wait was not long for my mother. She waited until I married Amin. She sang, she trilled for joy, she joined the women’s rhythmic clapping the day the contract was written and the day of the wedding, and on the morning of the following day she and my aunt visited me in my new house in Sidon. They came carrying the usual provisions for a newly married couple. One week later my aunt found her dead in her bed. My aunt said, “Last night she said to me ‘Halima, Sister, thank God I’ve married Ruqayya and she has moved safely and soundly to live in her husband’s house. Now it’s possible for me to travel to Egypt to look for Sadiq and Hasan.’ When I said to her that Egypt is large and that we don’t know where they are in it, she said, ‘Tell Abu Amin, and if he agrees we’ll go together, and if he doesn’t agree I’ll go alone. I won’t come back without them.’ Then she went to sleep.” My aunt wiped away her tears and got up. She went into my mother’s room and returned, extending her hand to me with a large iron key. She said, “The key to your house, Ruqayya.”

  “Strange. I haven’t seen it since we left the house. Where was she hiding it?”

  “She hung it around her neck. She didn’t take it off even when she slept or bathed. I would say to her, ‘Zeinab, Sister, the cord will wear out. Take it off when you bathe and then put it on again.’ She wouldn’t accept it. The cord came apart as I expected and she got a new cord to hang it on, and continued her habit of sleeping with it and bathing with it.”

  I took the key. After the three days of mourning I returned to my house. I thought I would give the key to Amin to keep with the papers, his birth certificate, his diploma, and his work permit. I became aware that I had no papers other than the identity card issued by Lebanese security, and I changed my mind. I thought, I’ll return it to my uncle Abu Amin because it’s the key to his house also, since it’s the same house. He’ll put it in the deep pocket of his long-sleeved qumbaz and will finger it from time to time and feel … and feel what? I put it on the palm of my left hand and contemplated it. An old iron key, dark in color and polished. It filled the hand; it had heft. I felt it with the fingers of my right hand, acquainting myself with it by touch after getting to know it by sight. Suddenly I smiled and decided that I was stupid, looking far and wide when the clear and simple thing was right in front of my eyes. I grasped the thin cord with both of my hands, raised it, and put my head into it. The key was now hanging on my neck. I held it and began to look at it again, then I put it under my dress, feeling the touch of the iron on the flesh of my breast. As with my mother, the key would remain suspended on my neck, in waking and sleeping. I do not take it off, even in the bathroom, and whenever the cord wears out I replace it with a new one.

  Years later when we moved to Beirut and I participated in the campaign for literacy among women in Shatila, and I had to visit the women of the camp to convince them of the importance of literacy, I discovered that what I had inherited from my mother was common. I found it strange—how could the women all do the same thing, without any prior agreement? I remember my first visit. Since it was my first time I was shy and confused, not knowing if the visit would seem intrusive or if it would be welcome. I was met by Umm Ibrahim, an elderly woman in her sixties who lived with her son, her daughter-in-law, and her grandchildren. She introduced herself to me, and I said that I was from Tantoura, and that I was the wife of Dr. Amin in the Palestinian Red Crescent. She said, “We’re from Saasaa, do you know it?” She spared my embarrassment by not waiting for me to answer. She continued, telling me about it and about the two massacres that occurred there. She said, “I lost a daughter in the first massacre, in February. She was five years old. We buried her there, in the village. In October, five months after the Jews had declared their state, they attacked us again. It was another massacre. They took over the village and threw us out.”

  Umm Ibrahim put her hand to her breast and showed me the key suspended on a cord around her neck. She said, “The key to our house.”

  Later on I would learn that most of the women of the camp carried the keys to their houses, just as my mother did. Some would show them to me as they told me about the villages they came from, and sometimes I would glimpse the end of the cord around their necks, even if I didn’t see the key. Sometimes I would not see it and the lady would not refer to it, but I would know that it was there, under her dress.

  My uncle Abu Amin laughed and said, “Congratulations to you both, for … Sadiq.”

  The infant was beside me on the bed. I looked up at my uncle and it seemed to me that I was going to say something. I did not speak. I was weak after a long night that seemed like forever. Sounds had escaped from me, driven by that axe that was hitting me mercilessly in my lower back. It shook the body. No, it did not shake it, it convulsed it. It split apart and seemed about to scatter in splinters, or else to collapse and cave in, turning into ruins. Then the pain subsided a bit, as if it was dissipating, almost. Two minutes and then the axe began striking again—is this what a tree feels like when the woodman’s axe strikes it? There was no axe and no tree, it was my body, convulsed in labor. My aunt held my hand and said, “The first birth is like this. You and the baby will be fine, God willing, and it will be easier the next time.” If she would only stop speaking. I couldn’t stand the sound, I couldn’t stand the axe. I clung to her hand and squeezed, maybe the pressure would stop the blow that cut my body in two. I shouted, calling for my father. I shouted his name aloud until it seemed as if all Sidon would hear the name and bring him to me, and he would stop the axe and carry me to safety. Suddenly it stopped. It seemed the baby had slipped out. I closed my eyes, or perhaps my eyes and ears closed of themselves. It was as if I had gone to sleep, or fallen into a coma. I didn’t hear the baby’s cry. I didn’t see him when the midwife held him by his feet and lifted him, smiling, announcing that it was a boy, thank God, and then began to cut the umbilical cord and to wipe off the amniotic fluid that remained in his hair and on his body. She must have put him beside me as I was unconscious. I was aware only of my body, tense under the pressure of a pain that was no longer completely there, as if it had slipped from waking to sleep. They all saw the boy before I did. In later years when I had Hasan and then when Abd al-Rahman came, I was conscious, I saw and heard, and I stretched out my hand to hold the new boy. But as for Sadiq, I found him wrapped in white diapers on the bed beside me, when I was roused by my uncle’s voice saying, “Thank God for the safe delivery! Congratulations to you both, for … Sadiq.” I opened my eyes and saw Amin’s face, pale and exhausted as if he had spent the night in labor. He gave me a bashful smile, and kissed my head. He didn’t say anything.

  For a moment I wanted to turn my face to the wall, because I was tired and wanted to sleep, or to go f
ar away, alone. I found myself looking at the boy, enjoying him: his hair was black and smooth, his locks covering the top of his forehead. He had a small face and features, a long face, and his eyes were shut. His hands appeared from the swaddling, looking like two rounded, soft pieces of dough; it looked as if some hand had pressed on each of them several times, forming dimples from which grew slender fingers, how long it was hard to tell, since they were closed and contracted like that. I couldn’t stop looking at the baby. My aunt brought him to me, here he was in my arms. I felt a tickle in my breast, which had not happened to me before. At the time I didn’t identify it as the rush of the milk.

  My mother was not present for the birth of any of her three grandchildren. Would the name have made her joyful or sad, would she have blessed it or suggested another name instead? That night, thinking stopped at this question which flitted through my mind, landing in a corner and returning later, after a week or two or three, then disappearing completely, not to return.

  My uncle Abu Amin was the one who named Sadiq and Hasan. He named them after I had them, for he did not give names before the birth; first he made sure of the health of the mother and the child, and then he gave the name. When I conceived the third boy I announced when I was still pregnant, in my fifth month, “If it is a girl I will name her Wisal, and if it is a boy he will be Abd al-Rahman.”

  11

  A Young Man’s Laughter

  Ezzedin announced, laughing, “Some people have all the luck! Mulukhiya soup and a job and a scholarship, all on the same day! Of course the mulukhiya is the most important. We’ve eaten the mulukhiya, and now I have to choose: the job or studying in the university? In fact, I have chosen.”

  Ezz loves mulukhiya and he loves it more when I make it for him. He turns the table into a carnival of laughter. He announces loudly, “Ruqayya’s mulukhiya can’t be beaten, she makes it better than my mother and my aunt and all the women of Sidon.” I signal to him with my eyes because I know that my aunt is annoyed by this talk, but he ignores my signal and expands on his love for his favorite dish, on the condition that it comes from my hands, because it strengthens the heart, hardens the bones, extends life and assures that no one will defeat the Arabs, despite all appearances to the contrary—and in all certainty, it will return Palestine to us! We laugh.

  I don’t know what the house would have been like, or how it would have been with my uncle and aunt, if Ezz had not been living with them. With his spontaneity he drew them into a bubbling cauldron of life, with his comings and goings, his comments and his stories and his endless wit. There was also the political news he would bring to his father; Abu Amin would listen with interest, and it would be followed by a long discussion about the possible and the impossible. Sometimes it seemed to me that Ezz could make friends with a passing breeze. He would introduce everyone to everyone, and his friends would become friends with each other, and his associates’ friends would become his friends. He would open the house to them, introduce them to his mother and father and then introduce the family to his family, and they would visit each other and form friendships. The house was never without guests: “This is my friend from Amqa, these guys are from al-Zeeb and they live in Ain al-Helwa, this family is from al-Tira and I invited them to lunch with us.” “Mother, what do you think about their daughter, isn’t she beautiful?” “Her eyes are small, Ezz … the girl who came with her brother two days ago, the girl from Safsaf, is prettier, her eyes are a beautiful black and her figure is like a gazelle’s!” My aunt is bothered by all the guests, but she busies herself with greeting and hosting them, and they take her, unawares, into their stories and anecdotes, into what happened and how it all ended. When they have gone and she’s overcome with exhaustion she sleeps deeply and peacefully, in spite of everything. Abu Amin, also, has earned standing among many young men: they greet him in the streets of Sidon, they come up to him happily when they see him in the coffee shop, and they come often to the house to ask about him, to consult him, and to listen to his stories.

  I said to Ezz, “As long as you’re going to go and live in Beirut, I’ll ask my aunt and uncle to move in with us.”

  “Who told you I was going to move to Beirut?”

  “Didn’t you say that you got a scholarship?”

  “I’m not going to accept it!”

  Amin joined in, “What do you mean? A scholarship from the agency for study at the American University, what crazy person would refuse that?”

  “I graduated from school and that’s enough. I have an offer of work as a teacher in the agency. My mind tells me, take the job, boy, stay with the old ones and with your friends and do work you love.”

  “We’re here with the old ones. Your friends won’t fly away, and anyway Beirut isn’t America, you can come back every weekend.”

  I left them talking and got up to make the coffee.

  I returned with the coffee and found them downcast. I surmised that they had disagreed, and I tried to dissipate the tension by telling them about a new sentence Sadiq had come up with that I thought was witty, but it didn’t interest them. Ezz drank his coffee, said goodbye, and went out.

  I asked Amin, “Did you quarrel?”

  “We differed. I said that he was stupid. He’ll regret his decision when he finds that the guys he surpassed in school have become engineers and doctors and men of law, that some of them have gotten their doctorates and become university professors, and he’s marking time, a high school teacher for the aid agency. He didn’t like what I said. He was annoyed.”

  “I think he doesn’t want to leave his parents.”

  “That’s foolish. I left my parents to study before I was thirteen years old.”

  “It’s different. He feels he’s responsible for them.”

  “I’m responsible, I’m the oldest. I won’t fail them. I’ll ask them to move in with us.”

  “I believe that Ezz wants to marry.”

  “Did he tell you that?”

  “He didn’t tell me but I know that he loves a girl in the camp. He wants to marry her.”

  “Has he introduced her to us?”

  I laughed. “She’s the only one he hasn’t brought to visit us or to visit my uncle’s house.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “He told me.”

  “He didn’t tell me!”

  “She’s from Saffurya.”

  “Have you seen her?”

  “I’ve seen her.”

  Amin moved his left hand, spreading out his fingers like a fan. “How?”

  I told Amin about the girl. I described her and told him what I knew of her family.

  There was no doubt about Ezz’s wish to marry this girl. I think it was one reason for his inclination not to accept the scholarship, and he may have wanted the job for the salary. He worked in the summers and sometimes during the school year, claiming that he did so because he loved the work, or because So-and-So embarrassed him and he could not refuse his request; but I knew that the financial situation in the family was not the best. My uncle had been forced to sell two of his boats and only one remained; and the house was always open and my uncle was generous as always, never refusing a request from someone in need. Neither Ezz nor my uncle Abu Amin spoke about it, but I deduced it from what my aunt said and alerted Amin. He was embarrassed to speak with his father, but he offered to give Ezz part of his salary regularly, every month. Ezz refused, saying, “You have a wife and son, and Ruqayya is pregnant. Our Lord has been gracious and blessed us, and we lack for nothing.” He said that and assured us it was true. But now, as he asserted that he preferred to work, I thought to myself that certainly all this was one reason, and maybe the primary reason and not the secondary one, for his refusal to continue his study.

  Ezz began his new work in the aid agency on the first of October, and on the 29th Israeli forces occupied Gaza and the Tripartite Aggression against Egypt began. Sidon blazed with demonstrations; I was following the news and reactions in Lebanon from my be
d, as I had given birth to Hasan. I remember that I was carrying an infant of less than three months in my arms when my uncle announced that he was going to Egypt.

  My aunt asked in amazement, “Why Egypt?”

  He looked at her, disliking the question: “Because it’s Egypt!”

  My aunt said, raising difficulties, “If my sister Zeinab were with us, she would say, ‘Take me with you so we can look for the boys.’” She sighed. “God have mercy on her and compensate her for her patience. For sure she’s living with them in Paradise now.”

  The words escaped me: “Wouldn’t it have been better for him to have mercy on her during her life, and leave her at least one of the three!”

  “Better, Ruqayya? He has his wisdom that his servants cannot fathom. Say rather, ‘Thank God, the only one we thank in adversity.’”